Re: [IUG] Cataloging for Encore

[Bob Duncan <duncanr at lafayette dot edu>]

At 10:35 AM 12/17/2007, Byron Mayes wrote:

> There's always the question of how many users throw a subject search at the
> catalog as a first run. A lot of catalogs default to keyword searches, one
> reason being to mitigate the general out-of-stepped-ness (is that a word?)
> of LCSH terms. However a keyword search only pulls up records including the
> search term. In our catalog at Temple, Zinn's cycling primer would not be
> found in a keyword search for "mountain biking" because neither the phrase
> nor the words "mountain" nor "biking" appear anywhere in the record.
>
> One could go further and note that "Mountain biking" is not an
> immediately related subject for "Outdoor recreation" nor for "Sports" (I
> think you can get to them by traversing the hierarchy). Several works in
> Temple's catalog cover mountain biking, but carry one of these subjects
> instead of "All terrain cycling."
>
> So a user using the term "mountain biking" in our catalog would completely
> miss Zinn's cycling primer in a keyword search, and experience "searchus
> interruptus" when doing a subject search (which he may not even do).
> Presumably a tag would mitigate both unsatisfactory experiences for the
> user.


Speaking of presumptions...are Encore tags included in the Encore 
search, or do they only come into play as a search refinement after 
the search has been performed?  I've looked at a handful of live 
Encore implementations and haven't discovered any library-added tags 
in a cloud yet, so I have no way of testing this.  (All the tags I've 
seen are subject headings.)

Can any live Encore sites that have added tagging confirm that the 
tag terms are included in the search?  Because if they're not, having 
the tag "mountain biking" associated with Zinn's Cycling Primer won't 
get the user any closer to the record if the search is "mountain 
biking"---the current implementation of tagging allows the user to 
*refine* the current search, but it doesn't allow the user to expand 
the search to discover records outside of the existing set.

Bob Duncan



~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
Editor of IT Communications
Lafayette College
Easton, PA  18042
duncanr at lafayette dot edu
http://www.library.lafayette.edu/